This an excerpt from an interview with one my friends who is an ardent lover of theater and is also a research scholar in Contemporary Indian theater.
Q: When did you start loving the art of drama?
I read my first play Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in I BA. Of course, at that time it was mere liking. Initially my love for drama was somewhat selfish. I loved it because it did not take me too long to finish, because it did not waste words, and because it was somewhat more lifelike than mere story-telling. I mean no disrespect to the other arts.
Q:Do you think drama is more effective than novel?
Yes and no.Firstly we must understand the difference between drama (play as text) and theater (play as performance).To be honest, it is quite hard to say if theater is more effective than the written forms of art, like the novel.One thing is for certain, its a multi-dimensional art that needs only one prerequisite-consciousness. No monetary status (well, depending on which kind of theater you go to), no need for literacy or academic experience.Novels are great. Writing a novel is no easy joke. Novels, poems, paintings, even music, have a theatricality about them. But see, that’s the point–Theater is everywhere. Because we all perform. This statement always comes with the danger of being reduced into diluted philosophy. Or it comes with the danger of being understood to mean that we are all puppets of a social or political or some psychological “structure”.
These two assumptions are somewhat justified, but (though i’d rather stay away from these abstractions) they miss out on deeper ideas which are flesh and bone.
Q:What is your area of research in theater?
My area of interest is Contemporary Indian theater.Specifically, on how Space in performance works. The relationship between a play’s text-space, its surroundings (audience, place of performance, etc), and its larger social implications, but also HOW theater happens (we know that anything can become theater, but how does that happen? What happens to a space when it becomes theater that makes that space “Theatrical”?)
Q:What is special about Indian theater as compared to European theater?
Firstly, when we say “Western theater”, we usually mean European theater during and after the 18th century.. What do you think happened to the drama world of that hemisphere during this time?It became closed-space theater.But that aside for the moment, it wasn’t till early on into the 20th century that dramatists began playing more with the performance aspect of plays than with mere ideas or characters. The Western world (academic, of course) viewed drama from the point-of-view of the text, Indian theaters concerned themselves more with performance.
This has a lot to do with perspective. And perspective can not be seen outside of social orders. The relationship, though, isn’t one-to-one.Erin B. Mee, in her book “Theatre of Roots”, tells us of her experiences with the work of K.N. Panikker (a very important in modern Indian theater). She tells us of how (working on a script) Panikker and his troupe did not bother with being “faithful to the text” but were more concerned with bringing out the ennestial sentiments and ideas within the text. This distinction between East and West is slowly coming down, as theatre tropues in the West have started (since, say, the 1930s) to move away from the text, and from the realist-naturalist trend, becoming more openly political and so on. But we must remember that our indigenous forms of performance were (and are) much more than this. Contemporary Indian theater is a theater of synthesis at many levels. It synthesizes the ancient with the here-and-now, history itself being non-linear. It synthesizes East and West, infusing the Proscenium (Western, realistic) stage-space with new meanings, or rebelling against it altogether as Badal Sircar and others have done.
Q:What do you think is the Indian theater situation now?
I’ll put it this way, we can not do away with the stage so easily. It is true that many see it as a stepping-stone to cinema and so on. Many performers and troupes are still stuck within the low-income group, many struggling in-between. As a form, it is flourishing since myriad traditions have come up. New practices have risen–such as Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre (which breaks away completely to the commerce-ridden auditorium-theatre), Habib Tanvir’s troupe Naya Theatre (which uses performers from tribal and other-cultural areas in its performances, making them “professional” in the commercial sense), and the rising Street Theatre troupes of Thamizhnaadu like the Chennai Kalai Kuzhu. But as commoners, we are still unaware of many of these. Its sad to know that many stage-performers become little more than exhibition models who fight to make a living..
A Quill and A Fork 